home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Monster Media 1993 #2
/
Image.iso
/
wp
/
petpe401.zip
/
WHYBUYPE.TXT
< prev
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-08-07
|
10KB
|
189 lines
╔═══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Don't Panic - use F10 for menu ║
║ - use F1 for Help ║
║ - use Alt-x to Exit ║
║ - use Alt-s to Save ║
╚═══════════════════════════════════════════╝
Why Buy pE - The "perfect" Editor
OK, you've gotten a copy of pE, now, how are you going to
evaluate it? There are a skillion editors out there. Why
should you try one more? And why this one? And why should
you send Just Excellent Software the registration fee?
Well, pE will read, and translate WordPerfect, Word for
Windows, Word for DOS, Windows Write, and AmiPro files, as
well as straight ASCII text. No special effort required, it
just does it. If the lines are longer than you like, pE will
wrap them on input.
Not enough, huh?
Well, pE will scan your directories looking for text (where
_did_ I put that darned letter to First Fidelity Bank anyway)
and when it finds 'that darned letter' it will load it into a
window which can be sized, moved, colored, cascaded, tiled or
stacked. And then it will do the same for 39 more, all at the
same time.
pE will search through files in its windows incredibly fast,
almost instantaneously. pEp, (pE professional) is capable of
handling multi-megabyte files, and can use _all_ the memory in
your computer, not just the 'lower' 640K.
That's just for starters, read on!
Have you ever wanted to keep a reference file on the screen
that maybe had data that was only a few columns wide? With
pE, you can not only have it occupy that part of the screen
you want, but when you want to, you can go grab whatever part
you want and stick it in the file you're working on.
Have you ever wanted to see the function referenced in an
include statement? Alt_I goes and gets the Include file and
puts it into a new window to edit or view. Put the cursor on
the line with the arrow and press Alt I. F2 will get you
back. You don't have to be a programmer to appreciate this
feature. You can see it being used right here!
--> READ WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID ABOUT PE IN "QUOTES.TXT"
Then there's the file chooser. Don't you just love having a
program ask you to "Enter Filename:" and you've forgotten how
to spell the name or even worse, what directory it was in?
With pE, Alt_O (open), Alt_E (edit), Alt_M (merge), Alt_V
(view), all present the file chooser. With the file chooser
you can navigate all over your disk with a few key strokes.
Pressing the first letter of your filename moves the highlight
bar to the first file in the current directory starting with
that letter. Selecting the file becomes a matter of pressing
Enter ─┘. From the file chooser, you can rename or delete
any file on your disk. Pressing F2 while in the file chooser
allows you to select a different path, or drive.
While we're on the subject of graphics, IBM in its infinite
wisdom, bequeathed upon the PC a character set that allows for
continuous lines that form several different box styles. Do
you really want to write a macro to draw a box? If you do,
you can, but don't need to! Try this, instead. Alt_B (mark a
Block, rectangular), followed by cursor right several times,
followed by cursor down several times, followed by Alt_1.
Surprised? Now put the cursor on the left edge of the box.
Press Alt_1. Lookee there! Try the cursor on the top bar of
the box, followed by an Alt_2. If you've followed what's
written you should have a box with two intersecting lines
through it.
┌─────╥─────┐
│ ║ │
│ ║ │
├─────╫─────┤
│ ║ │
│ ║ │
└─────╨─────┘
But wait a minute. Suppose the box isn't where you want it.
Mark it starting at the upper left corner with Alt_B. Press
End to mark all the way to the upper right corner, then down
arrow to the bottom row of the box. Press F7 (shift text) and
then watch the box float around the screen as you cursor left,
right, up, or down. When you got it where you want it, press
the grey + key on the numeric keypad. Try that with whatever
editor you're using! With a mouse, you can mark by clicking
the right button and dragging. Letting go of the button ends
the mark. Clicking the left button anywhere in the marked
region and dragging moves the marked area around on the
screen. This is an exclusive feature of pE's. No other text
editor has this capability - so far.
So now you're saying well that's fine but I need something to
write programs with. That means you want regular expressions,
find and replace (forward or backward), brace (or parend)
matching and the ability to mark a spot and return to it. Of
course pE does all those things, and a hundred more.
When you shell to DOS, pE's swaps all but about 2K of itself
out to EMS, XMS, or a disk file. This frees up memory to run
compilers, other programs, or even another copy of pE. Type
exit and you're back where you started. Of course you may
want to see what you did during that DOS shell. Press F11 (or
choose DOS window from the Window menu) and a window is opened
with your last DOS screen. The text can be edited, saved, or
the window can be just sized and used to review its contents.
pE (as of release 4.0) reads all the major word processing
formats and converts them to straight ASCCI. This means you
can read files produced by anyone and give them back a file
which they can read with any word processor. pE does this by
identifying the file format, no special action is required on
your part. pE will even wrap long lines to whatever you've
set the paragraph format to. This, like all options, can be
saved so that it becomes the default behavior for pE. A
different set of options can be associated with different
subdirectories so that pE behaves differently depending upon
where you call it from.
So how about word processing. When I'm writing documentation,
I want word wrap and formatting capabilities. And boy would
it be nice to have my program in one window and the doc file
in another! That way, the documentation may even be accurate!
And what I don't want is to have to learn 200 word processing
commands. Well, the file you're reading was typed with the
line length set to 68. That's it, brother. Automatic word
wrap at the right margin, and follow the left margin above.
Intelligent, Huh? Now if you want to get fancy ^F6 will turn
automatic formatting on so as you delete or insert, paragraphs
will be formatted according to the style you set up in
"Paragraph Format" under Options in the pull down menus. You
can choose from Left justify, Center or Right justify. You
can even choose to have the first line of a paragraph
indented, 'outdented' or not. And the best part of all this,
is with this one paragraph, you probably have learned as much
as you need to, to format documents. The user's guide goes
into much more depth, of course.
Alt_P (print) invokes the print processor. You can just print
whatever is in pE's active window with an ENTER on "Begin
Printing", or you can adjust margins, and turn headers and
footers on, or off, or even print to a file on disk, so you
can preview how it will look on paper, before you waste a
tree. The registered version of pE comes with the print
processor as an independent program, so you can print and
format files without having to read them into pE.
Speaking of Options, and pull down menus, have you tried
colors yet? Its lots of fun. The pull down menus are
accessed by holding the Alt key plus the shift key down, or F10
The top line of your screen will light up with the menu bar.
Clicking the right mouse button when the mouse is pointing at
the top line of the screen will also cause the menu bar to
appear. Pressing the highlighted letter followed by Enter
moves you to the menu of choice. Note the item labeled Help.
There are about 60 or 70 (lost count) of help screens. You
can get to the help menu with F1. If you don't like borders,
turn them off. The mouse can still be used to scroll and size
and mark.
Well if you're still with me at this point, thank you for your
patience. pE is 32,000 (more or less) lines of 'c' code and
about 4000 lines of assembler. There are 523 functions at
last count. Your registration will enable me to continue
development of pE and other products which are in the works.
If pE can be made to do what you want it to do that it doesn't
already do, why don't you drop me a line. I welcome
suggestions, whether or not you buy from me. (I welcome them
more if they're accompanied by a check, however). Please note
that the trial period is 30 days...
John Salidis, Just Excellent Software, Inc.
┌─────────┐
┌─────┴───┐ │ (R)
──│ │o │──────────────────
│ ┌─────┴╨──┐ │ Association of
│ │ │─┘ Shareware
└───│ o │ Professionals
──────│ ║ │────────────────────
└────╨────┘ MEMBER